The gap isn't narrowing at all, if you look at it from the angle of what the imaging hardware (optics/sensor) is capable of (not much), and how much headroom remains (almost none). We are now very deep in the era of computational photography and AI-enhancing, where algorithms cover-up for the source signal limitations and are let free to invent and omit data for the sake of optimizing a score meant to represent what Apple/Google _thinks looks pretty_.
I'd even go as far as claiming that this processing "taints" images in a very specific manner, and that images taken on today's smartphones will age very badly. I am no computational photography expert, but even I can tell that a photo comes from an iPhone: the bokeh looks uncanny (unnatural, one-dimensional, often with visible contours), the white balance biases towards yellowish tones, the amount of selective sharpening/micro-contrasting is uneven.
Other manufacturers (Samsung, Google) have comparable although distinct biases that may comfort your ideals of aestheticism or not, the point is that it's not feasible to get neutral takes out of those devices, because they are not technically able to do so. Computational photography is what they are and what defines them: true you can pull RAWs out of them (which are mostly only so in name), but that serves to reveal how-much is processed out of it.
Anyhow, I am not comfortable with the status-quo, and that drove me to buy a mirrorless camera a couple years ago: I don't even care whether it might take worse photos than my phone (it doesn't) or be harder to handle (quite the opposite!), I just want to opt-out of Apple's/Google's opinionated ride on modern photography, and take back the ability to make photos that look natural although somewhat imperfect.